-Member Event: New Poetry Reading Series in Historic Harrisville – The Loom

Two accomplished contemporary poets, Joan Houlihan of Concord, MA and Peter Covino of Providence, Rhode Island will read their poems and discuss them with the audience, Sunday, Nov. 11 at 5:30 pm, in Harrisville NH, at the St. Denis Church. This is the inaugural poetry reading of a seasonal series of poetry events.

The goal of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, is to broaden perspectives, confidence and appreciation of what poetry can mean by weaving contemporary poets, their poetry, and the audience together in a vibrant new design.

Rebecca K. Gibson, founder of the series, long-time poetry teacher at Tufts University and published poet, (OPINEL, 2015, Bauhan Publishing) hopes to inspire people to trust their own attentive responses to language. As a recently invited “incorporator” of Historic Harrisville, though she’s a resident of Marlborough, Rebecca was intrigued by the old-fashioned rural village scale and cosmopolitan variety of skills and interests that comprise the engaged Harrisville community. That it’s situated easily between Peterborough, Dublin and Keene make it a convenient Monadnock destination.

Joan Houlihan’s recent work, Shadow-feast explores in startlingly unexpected finely-honed language the death of her husband. The Los Angeles Review described it as “a tour de force, sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps and thrilling in its sonic resonances.”

Peter Covino, prize-winning poet, translator of Italian, and editor, was previously a social worker in the fields of foster care and AIDS services in NYC. Of his book, The Right Place to Jump, Marjorie Perloff wrote, “these [are] wonderfully funny, sad, heartbreaking, jaunty, and always delightfully accurate poems.”

The event is free and open to the public.
Books by the poets will be available for sale.